You may not like Donald Trump and his many minions supporters, but “you don’t have the right” to invade their privacy by outing them on public forums. That was Whoopi Goldberg’s take on The View Tuesday when she blasted calls to out Hollywood attendees to an upcoming Trump fundraiser.
The brouhaha began over the Labor Day weekend when actors Debra Messing and Eric McCormack of Will & Grace fame took to Twitter to call on The Hollywood Reporter to publish the names of those who ended up going to an announced Sept. 17 fundraiser for Trump in Beverly Hills.
In a tweet on Friday, [Messing] called on THR to “print a list of all attendees please,” adding that “the public has a right to know.” Her longtime co-star Eric McCormack responded to Messing’s message with a similar request: “Hey, @THR, Kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don’t wanna work with. Thx.”
On Tuesday, an incensed Goldberg shared her “view” on the daily talk show she co-hosts on ABC.
“Listen, the last time people did this, people ended up killing themselves,” Goldberg said, referring to Joseph McCarthy’s Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. “This is not a good idea, OK?” As Meghan McCain nodded in agreement, “Your idea of who you don’t want to work with is your personal business. Do not encourage people to print out lists because the next list that comes out, your name will be on and then people will be coming after you.”
“We had something called a blacklist and a lot of really good people were accused of stuff,” she continued. “Nobody cared whether it was true or not. They were accused. And they lost their right to work. You don’t have the right! In this country, people can vote for who they want to. That is one of the great rights of this country.”
It probably should come as no surprise that Trump himself jumped into the fray, tweeting Messing had expressed gratitude to him back in the day when his TV show The Apprentice was doing well for NBC, the network they shared.
“How times have changed!” Trump tweeted, reports the Daily Beast.
Neither Messing nor McCormack had responded to Goldberg as of Tuesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But Messing did have a comeback for one of Trump’s faves, the Rev. Darrell Scott, who tweeted that he wished a ni... , er, Messing would list him. (Although when thinking Hollywood A-listers, was anyone really thinking about Rev. Scott? Just asking. For a friend.)